On India and Mexico

Monthly Review, Dec, 1985 by Firdaus Jhabvala

I returned to India for the first time in eighteen years last January. India is much more united than before and there is a clearly Indian character emerging from the mosaic of different peoples, races, languages, religions, etc. that constitute present-day India. It was heartening to see Bengalis in Mysore, Kashmiris and Punjabis in Madras, South Indians in Delhi, and so on. The national market and government have been cementing together and Indianness that has been missing and that is sorely needed within the structure. When I was a schoolboy I remember my school friends all telling me that it didn't really matter if China took the Himalayas or not, since they were far away. In college, my Marathi friends were not excessively bothered by the war with Pakistan (1965) since the fighting was going on in Rajasthan, we were in Bombay, and probably the Pakis would bash up the Gujaratis (deservedly, some thought). I am sure this has changed. India is further away from tribalism and closer to nationhood in a part of the world where nations and countries don't last (Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka now, etc.). I think it is fair to say that Indian nationalism will assert itself more and more. People from all walks of life told me the same thing over and over again: "India comes first, and then we will see about the rest." So I think we have an emerging national force in the third world--perhaps not as audacious as China, but coming along.

India is going to be a more capitalist country also. It has an impressive entrepreneurial class and is going through what seems to me to be the preliminaries of a rude "only the fittest survive" capitalist system. It is rapidly urbanizing. Bombay is a veritable slum, Calcutta not as much a slum as I had imagined, Madras is following the two bigger cities--all three affected by rural and political migration. And then there is Delhi, the only Indian city maintained in a curiously un-Indian state by the central government, almost against its natural self, perhaps because of the diplomats.

The nationhood aspect and the capitalism India has chosen are intricately tied together, but in the long run are at logger-heads. India is in a part of the world where revolutionary changes have swept away ideological debris--in China, East Asia, and the USSR. In India change came easily, via Gandhi. The British did away with thuggery, infanticide, wife-burning, etc. All this during Lord William Bentinck's time (some 140 years ago). As you know, all our great murder routines are back again in independent India and in 1985! So, Barrington Moore's thesis on India is correct: Non-violent change left a lot of ideological debris drifting around that hinders the movement of the society and tends to channel revolutionary change into regional, linguistic, religious, or other issues. Capitalists don't actively advocate these differences, but it seems to be clear enough that while they are around no clear class issue can be presented. This is where nationalism and capitalism will clash. It has not happened yet, but it will; and I fear that capitalism will win out, at least in a substantial portion of Indian territory.

The farm situation is better than it was eighteen years ago. There is immense traffic with the Gulf countries--a great civilizing project for both India and the Gulf. The educational system is still as solid as when the British imported education. I think India has what is needed to solve its problems of poverty and misery. Urban misery and beggary are appalling, but in a large measure it is rural India coming to the cities, a possibility it did not have before. We were chased by lepers in Mysore, surprised by a human quadruped in Hyderabad, and witnessed the most gory human mutilations imaginable in Bombay. Yet the smaller towns and villages of west, south, and north India we visited were not this way. They were poor, but decently poor. In east India, the Left Front has done a decent job in West Bengal; Bihari villages are not as destitute as I had thought. Slowly, they are moving forward.

Indian industries make a large percentage of the machines the country uses, and the foreign debt is not large. I visited the Tata steel works, a neighboring engineering plant in Jamshedpur, Bihar (East India)--all quite modern and flourishing, with Indian technology. In this sense, Asian capitalism has depended on local technology to develop the productive forces (especially labor) much more than Latin American exploitative capitalism. Also dependency on the transnationals is less, much less, in India than in Mexico. So I left with immensely mixed feelings. I don't think Indian nationalism will take the form of protecting inefficient capitalism in its dependent form, as in Mexico, for example. The lack of natural resources obviates that possibility. But I don't know how the nationalism-capitalism dialectic will work out.

Mexico is rapidly tiring itself out, paying over 10 percent of its GNP to foreign banks. The system is using up its political capital to sweat out the economic capital to keep the foreign banks happy. So Mexico is the banks' example to the rest of the third world. The petty bourgeoisie is quite upset that the national pie is not growing, and feels it has more to gain by moving to the right. The bourgeoisie is also worried that the ruling system may not be able to hold the line in a class war and may sacrifice some of its interests. These two groups form the New Right, especially in the north and in parts of the conservative center of the country.